The thoughts and perceptions of an aspiring writer on life and the world around her

Willy Wonka and the Workplace Violations Report

Recently we have received a number of complaints by visitors of the Golden Ticket Tour at Mr. Wonka’s confectionery factory. For personal reasons, all of the complainants have wished to remain anonymous. Mr. Wonka has a reputation for secrecy and no one has entered or left his factory in the last ten years, yet he continues to produce his confectionery products sold worldwide. Mr. Wonka has been suspected for dubious business practices for quite some time and these complaints provide a unique insight in how Mr. Wonka runs his factory, which have been very useful in our investigation. It has come to our attention that he may be accused of possible workplace violations, using an illegal workforce, and misconduct to children, yet this needs to be studied further. Here is a violations that have been reported by the complainants from the Golden Ticket Tour and other anonymous individuals:

I. Health and Safety

1. Safety concerns pertaining to Mr. Wonka’s facility:

a. Chocolate river has no safety rail and leads to a grinding machine via pipes.

b. Chocolate river boat has no safety rail either which caused a visitor to fall in the chocolate river while trying to consume its contents.

c. Nut Sorting Room has a gaping hole in the middle which leads straight to a garbage incinerator.

d. Great Glass Elevator smashes through a room.

e. New equipment has resulted significant mishaps such as one growing too much hair required the assistance of a lawn mower, one being turned into giant blueberries, one floating off into space, and a number of them being shrunk to fit on a small screen.

f. TV Room has a teleporter that could shrink anything to an inch so they could fit on a screen.

g. Whenever such similar mishaps befell any of the visitors during the Golden Ticket Tour, witnesses testify that you discussed rather bizarre solutions as if they were standard safety procedures that included:

i. Being compressed through an unknown procedure in the Fudge Room to get unstuck from a pipe after falling into the Chocolate River which resulted in the visitor exiting the facility as extremely thin and/or perhaps covered in chocolate.

ii. After being transformed into a blueberry, one visitor was restored through a juicing process yet was left permanently purple and absurdly flexible.

iii. Two visitors almost faced certain death in a garbage incinerator after falling from a gaping hole in the Nut Sorting Room. Both emerged from facility covered in garbage.

iv. After being shrunk in the TV Room, one visitor was stretched by a taffy puller which resulted in leaving the facility 10 ft tall but almost paper thin.

h. Mr. Wonka is a known recluse and his factory designed as a maze of differing rooms, mazes, spaces, and experiences. Visitors from the Golden Ticket Tour reported that it was hard to know what was coming around the next corner and a lot of them had trouble finding the exit besides the front door afterwards.

2. Health concerns pertaining to Mr. Wonka’s facility:

a. Labor force was not seen in appropriate attire when handling any edible products according to one Golden Ticket Tour visitor who owns a factory of his own. He particularly noted seeing the workforce handle any edible products without wearing hairnets or gloves.

b. Same visitor also expressed doubts on whether the workers washed their hands or whether any of the facilities were regularly kept up to sanitary conditions.

c. Liquid chocolate was stored in a subterranean river system that left the substance at risk of exposure to contamination for a considerable length of time. Same goes for the other candy products in the Chocolate Room, which many of Golden Ticket Tour visitors touched with their bare hands. On the Golden Ticket Tour, Mr. Wonka took his visitors boat ride on the chocolate river in which one fell in while trying to consume its contents. It is not known whether Mr. Wonka ever ordered his workers to dispose of the chocolate.

II. Labor

1. Labor concerns pertaining to Mr. Wonka’s facility:

a. One former employee who was at the factory during the Golden Ticket Tour testified that he spontaneously had his entire paying workforce laid off due to an issues in industrial espionage. Judging that the former employee was previously living in squalid conditions, saving up money from public assistance to buy his grandson a candy bar, and is cared for by of one of his children, it is highly unlikely any of Mr. Wonka’s former employees received compensation or worker’s pension. Though he has no bad feelings for Mr. Wonka and has now moved into the factory with his family since the Golden Ticket Tour, he still feels the need to acknowledge this since many of Mr. Wonka’s former employees still express bitterness over the situation.

b. Same former employee also said that after the layoff, Mr. Wonka had his paid workforce replaced by a large number of undocumented immigrants from some obscure Third World country that is not officially recognized status under the United States government and one even the geography teacher in the Golden Ticket Tour has never even heard of. It can be fair to say that none of them have any authorization to work in this country nor could provide any documentation.

c. Mr. Wonka has been reported to openly admit that he pays these undocumented employees in nothing but cacao beans. Yet, he says he does provide comfortable housing facilities for them, though we are not sure about their diets.

d. Though Mr. Wonka says his workers are happy at his factory, it is unknown whether he actually allows them to come and go as they please since there has never been anyone entering or exiting the facility in ten years. Then again, owing to his workers’ undocumented status, it does not appear they have much of a choice. Their strong fears about deportation should also be taken into account.

e. Mr. Wonka said that his current employees originate from a faraway place known as Loompaland, which was filled with carnivorous beasts who preyed on them. He says that these Oompa Loompas see him as some benefactor and that living and working in his factory for cacao beans is not much of a sacrifice to them. Yet, we only have his word for it since all they have been seen doing by the Golden Ticket Tour visitors consisted of producing candy, being test subjects in his experiments, drinking alcoholic beverages while on the job, and suddenly bursting into song and dance routines whenever there was a mishap involving four of the Golden Ticket recipients.

f. It has been witnessed that Mr. Wonka uses his workers to test for side effects in his confectionery, sometimes with severe and possibly fatal results though he does what he can to rescue them when such tests go awry.

g. Some have said that a few of the design ideas at Mr. Wonka’s factory have come from a few of his staff members themselves, though we are sure he usually takes the credit.

III. Food Safety

1. Judging by the Golden Ticket Tour visitors’ testimonies, we find the safety of some of Mr. Wonka’s products questionable to put on the market. These consist of:

a. Fizzy Lifting Drinks which are soft drinks that make people fly. Fortunately, they could descend through belching on this one despite that one Golden Ticket recipient and his grandfather were almost killed by a fan while on one of these.

b. Three Course Dinner Chewing Gum that turns its consumers into large blueberries once they get to dessert. Even if juiced, the victims remain purple forever and sometimes gain flexibility in their skeletal system.

c. Confectionery products being stored in unsanitary conditions and open for contamination.

d. Everlasting Gobstoppers which are said to never get smaller no matter how long someone sucks on them.

g. Rainbow drops that people could suck and spit in six different colors.

h. Hair Toffee, a candy that causes excessive hair growth on both hair and chin (even on women). Major side effect for consumers includes having to use landscaping equipment to maintain their hair from then on.

i. Exploding Candy.

2. Mr. Wonka has yet to release a list of ingredients for many of his concoctions, many of which could contain harmful chemicals or pose dangerous side effects, particularly to children. If Mr. Wonka fails to cooperate with us, perhaps we can purchase some of these products for chemical analysis.

IV. Environment

1. We are not just concerned of what is in some of Mr. Wonka’s questionable products, but also whether he is using any chemicals or is properly disposing any excess waste transported out of his factory and the potential impact they may have in the surrounding community, particularly if it is a chewing gum that turns people into blueberries. We do know his factory has an incinerator but that is as much as we know about his facility’s waste disposal.

2. We are not sure what Mr. Wonka runs his machinery on or their environmental impact on the surrounding community. All we know is that he has perhaps the largest confectionery in the world which must consume a lot of energy and perhaps water. It is unknown whether Mr. Wonka has reverted to sustainable practices.

3. We suggest we test the water in the surrounding community to see whether Mr. Wonka’s practices have any impact on public health.

V. Conduct with Minors

1. A while back, Mr. Wonka staged a contest to allow five lucky children into his factory by hiding five golden tickets in his chocolate bars.

2. During the Golden Ticket Tour four of the five children were involved in some dangerous situation whether it pertained to falling into a chocolate river and getting stuck in a pipe, getting turned into a blueberry while chewing an experimental gum, falling through a gaping hole that led to a garbage incinerator, and getting shrunk by a teleporter.

3. Despite what happened to these four children, Mr. Wonka has not issued an apology for the life changing trauma they went through at his factory. Rather he states that these children were spoiled brats who refused to listen to his warnings and have nobody but themselves to blame causing some to believe he steered them in to such trouble to scare them straight.

4. Mr. Wonka has also declined to give compensation to any of these four children and their families on account that he viewed their parents as indulging to their child’s every whim and should probably try being better parents. Has been known to politely discourage others from questioning him, including the parents. The parents have decided to sue for damages.

5. Apparently, Mr. Wonka seems to be either calm or amused to see children suffer under perilous conditions whether it is through a spectromatic boat tunnel that many of the Golden Ticket Tour visitors found rather scary or all the previous fates of four children he sees as “teaching a lesson” that boundaries should be respected.

VI. Mr. Wonka’s Character

1. In this investigation, we find Mr. Wonka as an enigmatic figure who has a problem with transparency, has more concern for his candy than human beings, and has no regard for industrial safety procedures whatsoever. He never thinks about what he put his former workers through or any impact he has upon the local community, the environment, or public health.

2. Mr. Wonka is a very rich man has not released his financial records for several years and it is unknown whether he actually pays taxes. He also has yet to disclose the names of those who supply him with raw materials or whether he pays them. Given his reputation as a one of the richest recluses in the world, Mr. Wonka fails to realize that transparency is the rule when running an industrial establishment.

3. Mr. Wonka fails to understand that to run an industrial workplace, particularly a confectionery, maintaining a clean and safe workplace are top priorities. While it is perfectly fine for Mr. Wonka to design his workplace as a creative playground, health and safety in the workplace should always come first whether that means having guard rails, having workers wash their hands and cover their hair, and making the facility easily navigable for workers and visitors. Mr. Wonka has ignored these.

4. Mr. Wonka also does not seem to understand that all food items should be stored in sanitary conditions and free from contamination. This means that all of his confectionery ingredients should be stored in sealed containers and not exposed to the open air. Who knows what the contents in the Chocolate Room have been exposed to.

5. Mr. Wonka does not see anything wrong with child endangerment whether it pertains to his products and factory equipment. In fact, he sees nothing wrong with releasing certain products that contain potentially harmful chemicals.

6. One visitor remarked that he mentioned the word “snozzberry” during a stop pertaining to flavored wall paper. The only definition our investigation managed to find for this word was a British slang term for penis.

7. Mr. Wonka does not see any reason to have his factory or policies structured to meet confectionery regulations.

VII. Response

1. That in evaluating these complaints from the Golden Ticket visitors and others, we continue our thorough investigation into Mr. Wonka’s activities by inspecting the facilities in question to determine whether there is any truth behind their complaints. If their testimonies prove accurate than it is with all due respect that we give time for Mr. Wonka to meet regulations or else face criminal charges for health and safety violations, food safety violations, workplace misconduct, hiring an undocumented workforce, environmental damage, lack of transparency, and child endangerment.

2. But first it would best to notify Mr. Wonka of the charges he may be up against and our intended actions during the investigation as well as inform him on what he should do to avoid arrest. Yet, even if he does conform to workplace regulations, this does not mean he is immune to lawsuits and criminal prosecution. Also, note that he designated the lone unharmed Golden Ticket recipient as his heir who is ten years old. Thus, Mr. Wonka might have been expecting this.